One of Godard's first film-essays, Une Femme Mariée is a study of “woman reduced to an object by the pressures of modern life, incapable of being herself” (Godard's words, in a 1964 interview). Jean Collett, in “Jean-Luc Godard: An Investigation Into His Film and Philosophy,” notes that “The title was originally La Femme mariée - The Married Woman - but the French Censor Board insisted the ‘The' be changed to ‘A' so as not to impugn all married womanhood.”

“Une Femme Mariée is sub-titled ‘fragments of a film' and this, in fact, is what it is. Or rather it is a collage made up of four kinds of film materials. There are the ordinary scenes of a day in the life of a married woman. Interspersed amidst these scenes are seven cinéma-vérité type interviews. The third element of the collage is the tremendous importance given by Godard to the ephemera of modern life, the significance of the world of advertising in the lives of the characters. Finally, there are what one can only call the still-lives, the three sequences of love-making.”